TJ 0:00

Yes, what's going on everyone. Welcome to a, another, a brand new rugby muscle podcast. Yes, we are back with the podcast for 2022, this podcast itself, and the next couple podcast. Bear with me with the audio I've been having some real, really frustrated, habits, mood, annoying issues going on with this audio, but I made a pledge to get this podcast. And now we're, you know, we're at the end of February recording these podcasts and, I want to begin in one hour every single week for 2020. Starting from now. So if you bear with me the next couple of weeks, the audio will 100% get significantly better. What won't get better, actually. What, what will stay a 10 out of 10 will be the quality of the content, the guests, the, the insights that you're going to get, like I'm really putting this podcast has been. Going F going strong for a long time now. And, you guys, listen, I'm really proud of, the loyal fan base that we've kind of established here, listen to the rubbing muscle poker. So if you're part of that fan base and you haven't given us five stars, well, now you've even gotten a much better opportunity because Spotify is actually now. Five-star reviews. So please go to Spotify and give us a five-star review. It really does help out. If you listen to obviously on apple podcast, give us a five star, review that on Spotify. You don't even have to type anywhere. You don't have to own apple podcasts as well, but on Spotify, you don't even have to be calm type. Any words review you just go there. Give us five. And that will help out massively. For this episode, we are joined back. we're going back to the old, tried and tested. We've got my man, Alex Miller from Kabuki strength on formerly of CrossFit London. So we had a real big chat because something that we both get questions. As coaches is on CrossFit. Like we get, I get asked all the time about CrossFit and ropy the carry over how it can work, how it can help, what can be improved with both aspects of rugby and CrossFit in terms of like training and how that can be done better. So we discuss all of that and more in this hour-ish long of CrossFit and rugby dissected. Hope you enjoy it. I'm joined by Alex. Alex is in Canada. I'd have to turn my err camera a hell of a long way to, to get there. How are you doing?

Alex 2:18

Yeah,

TJ 2:18

I'm good. Actually I've got one of my athletes lives in Canada and he's doing some, he's doing some low and slow LISS and he's like, ah, what do I do about runnY noses when it's this cold run inside? Like, no, definitely not. Don't do it. That you solution that's not a solution.

Alex 2:33

And in fact he's lifting, right?

TJ 2:35

Yes. But he's also need to develop the aerobic system. You know this? Yeah, of course. Won't the gym have cardio machines. That's what I'm saying. Go inside, but that's not, don't do it as different.

Alex 2:47

Ah so don't do it outside.

TJ 2:49

Yeah, fair enough. Okay. And speaking of doing conditioning inside today because we're joined by you in a different country. Now, last time I was joined by you on the podcast, you were in a CrossFit gym, and you were part of a CrossFit facility. Now that you've left that I want, I want you to dig the dirt up like Alex says, what he really thinks on CrossFit today on the rugby muscle podcast. What do you think should we should we discuss? Yeah. Cool. So it's definitely the modality I get asked about the most, is whether it's Metcons, whether it's just CrossFit in general rugby players seem to align themselves with CrossFit a lot. And I know last year we did a, a really good podcast dissecting what powerlifters can learn from rugby players and rugby players can learn from power lifters. I think we wanna do something similar to that, but today, but with CrossFit, I think in order to understand like and frame, this conversation from that point of view, we have to straight away like say that CrossFit is its own sport. Right? We were looking across it as a sport, kind of a training modality, but more than anything, it's a sport in itself. And how can this, what can we learn from this sport? And what can this sport do better if you're going to train this way, right. As a, as a rugby player, but realize that they're two very, very, very rugby and CrossFit are two different sports, two different things, right?

Alex 4:10

Yeah. I mean, it's like saying, Hey, I'm going to go I dunno play water polo instead of like rugby training. I'll say it's, it's definitely, there's a place for non rugby based conditioning program. I think like in the off season, potentially something it isnt but it's not going to replace your rugby training. I think as a GPP kind of style deal, like something different, maybe it's a place where that yeah, I think,

TJ 4:39

yeah. It's a different sport. It's not, it's not even a complimentary thing, like in general, right. That can be complimentary things that it can help you build towards as a rugby player. But in general, what you've got to understand is, is it that different sports and whilst one can help the other, it's like, yeah, more polo. Maybe I, I I'd look at more like, you know, rugby players do judo to help them or wrestling to help them with techniques within the game. We've crossed it Robin and techniques of, of specific parts of the game. We're probably looking at different physical qualities that we would develop through the lens of CrossFit.

Alex 5:18

Yeah. I mean, I just picked up yeah. I think even then CrossFit, a physical quality developer, like I think it would show us

TJ 5:28

could, yes. Okay. So before we get into that, is it, is it, are you still in touch with the CrossFit world? What is, what is acrostic game soon or is there an open coming up the

Alex 5:38

openness Sunday? Yeah, that's fine now.

TJ 5:44

and what do, what I know it's constantly varied, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right. But what is the actual open? Because that's, when we're looking at, across the open that's as CrossFit, as a sport as it gets, right?

Alex 5:58

Yeah. So I would send the cost for open as a low barrier entry, first round competition. So when they do, they use it, they use the course for open as a competition. Into site, a community feeling, but to filter out harder for athletes to go into that state

TJ 6:16

of, and what will the, and the open is, isn't it like how many seconds? A few

Alex 6:22

weeks.

TJ 6:22

So the cross, the open is what? Consecutive weeks of blackout. Yeah. Yeah, but it's a specific walkout, right? Full weeks, a specific workout. So it's, you can do it whenever you want. But ideally it's like, it's like preparing for a game, right? You, you do you week cause prepare for that workout if you do well, or if you're a casual, just like your casual, rubber, but you just rock up on the day, you give it your best effort and then you see, see how you get on, right.

Alex 6:53

Try not to get hurt

TJ 6:56

at works for both ways as well. And so, and so what do those sessions look like? They're in intense, they're usually an intense 20 to 30 minutes.

Alex 7:06

Yeah. So retirement domains, of course, kind of with the quite varies from like three minutes up to like, do they have like a math and road at one

TJ 7:16

point? Yes. That was about as extreme as it got low. Right. I do just need to remember doing the math and not doing, I didn't do a marathon row. Okay. Let's be clear. Don't wanna mislead anyone. I do distinctly remember them doing the marathon row and watching that, but that was a good few years ago. And that's more of the exception. Yeah.

Alex 7:32

So normally like three minutes to say 15, 20 minutes.

TJ 7:36

Okay. And so that's the sport that if you're a CrossFit athlete, that's what you're going to be preparing for. Right? Yeah. And so with that, like we can almost analyze and see, they're like, that's quite similar. And maybe if, if it's, if you do like a regional competition or wherever, cause there's a lot more of these as well. Right. It's not just the games, there's not just CrossFit regionals. There's like, I don't know. I'm going to make the tendons tighten, throw down, you know, like there's lots of different many competitions and whatever. If people, if people want to do that more power to them, it looks, yeah. I was going to say, it looks like fun. There's a lot of fun. It hard work. I mean, the people doing it that I haven't been able to have, they had fun afterwards and maybe that's the same as rugby. Right. But that's the point I was going to go to. It's it's intense and then there's a break in and it's intense. And then there's a bright light. Even with that, that's very similar to what we are dealing with. Fitness demands wise to a game of rugby, right?

Alex 8:37

Yeah. So I think the training probably looks more at that in terms of the time, the, once the events tend to be static and to like say for the free minute events, but it's a Freeman of flat-out, but you don't get a break on that one. And then for one of the longer events you have pacing deal. So it would be more like a, we'll a joke for 20 minutes almost honestly, event last time, what you live here with, whereas a torn bonds of rodeo it's intimate into a sprint car. Yeah.

TJ 9:09

But then even, I'd say the longer CrossFit events you have like five cleans into a run to five, or they wouldn't do five. They would do 20 pull-ups and the pull-ups would be akin to running. Yeah. Cause they have pull-ups, isn't a high demand in activity for CrossFitters, especially the way they've got that technique, then

Alex 9:32

keep that kipping pull-ups out. So butterfly. Yeah.

TJ 9:37

Yeah. That's a skill. Yeah. But once they've got that skill down, pull-ups ended up being actually more of our, in a rubric activity compared to, you know, most people that can do, pull-ups like they're doing it for pull-ups sake are more like you know, that's more like doing 10 reps or something and that's actually very tough. Yeah. You know what I mean?

Alex 9:58

So I can see, I could see it as a similar time.

TJ 10:01

Yeah. Yeah. Similar time to most kind of similar sort of energy system demand. But as you say, like rugby's a lot more intermittent sprints and I'll say, yeah, you're almost certainly right in the there's a lot more. Maybe if we compare CrossFit to like rugby training, it's a lot similar as well though, because you you can mimic, like later on in the game intensity in training. And I think that that's something that sort of shows the intensity of rugby when it's most intense and you don't always get exposed more often than not. It's not right. More often than not your standard still walking through for the most part. But when there are intense moments in rugby or intense times in rugby, you've gotta be prepared for those. So you've got train those and you've also got to expect those habits. Whilst I fixed my mic. You want to touch on? What you said that as far as CrossFit, as a modality to build CrossFit performance.

Alex 10:59

It's not constant testing so we can look across for it and all the high intensity stuff like, but TJ alluded to, if you could raise your aerobic capacity, then you raise your reserve which is kind of what you need in crossfit as well. So I personally would see the sport of CrossFit as a less than optimal way of developing the sport of CrossFit. But I would look at something like a lower level training for CrossFit. So doing something I learned intensity and building a capacity alongside of decent strength program at the best way of building up CrossFit kind of fitness in the same way as like, like you might continue tempo work plus sprints plus strength for rugby. You'd probably break down the post hospital comment that so you'd have like a gymnastics sediment, you'd have a weightlifting element, you'd have a low element, then you bridge into that competitive stuff. So when I write out, so I've got a regional cluster after the, all my thoughts and for him, we've break down his programming into preparation phase. Then we have a bridging phase where we start introducing the competitive stuff that kind of hotter, hotter and stuff. And then in the competition phase, and we would presume to be very similar procreate maybe a bit more current broccoli I'd

TJ 12:17

imagine. Well, it depends on how long you're up you season is like I guess,

Alex 12:22

yeah. Yeah, that's true. I'll go, but go ahead. Pro basketball player at the moment. And he gets like four weeks, obviously it's in the year.

TJ 12:29

Yes. Yes. You have no choice, but to do concurrent stuff, if that's your case, but in general, yeah. This is a side tangent, but if you had, I don't know, let's say, you had two years of, no necessary end goal. Right? Like the end goal was to, was for the CrossFit games in two years. And then I'll ask you for rugby. If you had the end goal was to, to perform your best in either the CrossFit games or some competition in two years time, how much of that two years would you spend in the prep phase versus the breach phase versus the,

Alex 13:07

yeah, that's a good question. So I'd cycle it. So it have I probably hit competition phases every year, but each year, but it would be less psychologically demanding. So there would be no repercussions from Hockaday rice. Probably we're still touching it. And like, even though I'm saying, Hey, I have these like limited stages where we build up on whatever limiting actually is. They would still be a curve and says of high intensity work. We can't sacrifice who with a higher intensity capacity just to build low

TJ 13:39

capacity. I don't want to touch on that. That actually preparatory phase also gets a bad rap because just people think it's just boring, like easy stuff. You, you can be in a prep phase and do real heavy work and, you know, even heavy fairly specific work. When it, when it's on who's ready. You don't have to be limited by that. Sorry. Carry on.

Alex 14:01

No, no, no. I, I totally agree with that way. Even in powder thing, like if I have someone in a preppy phase, like they still score back and definitely like this heavier girls, cause you, you have to stay in touch with your sport skill. I like, this is a difference between how a two year plan for rugby and to implant something like. It's like, hope you still play rugby. Yeah. Right. You wouldn't do it. Wouldn't

TJ 14:22

snowflake. Well, yeah, you would try to, I mean, again, actually that's a, that's a sneaky little way of doing things, but well, I've tended to do. And what I've seen with some of my athletes that I'm dealing with at the minute, like these last two years, we've like, COVID sort of ravaging the fixtures, listening to stuff. Like some of the times we were using games as like, you know, just go out and have like, you can enjoy this game because there's no pressure of performance. We're not like try some new things. And we can go into that game fatigue and be okay with that because it's not the be all and end all, we're almost using the training as an extra stimulus for the program. So we're not, so yes, we're actually playing a full game of rugby, but this is, we're still in our prep phase. And I think that that's a, a way people can solve that sort of problem. Of not having enough time in the off season for rugby is really trying to target specific games or target specific times of the season when you really want to be prepared and then be okay with not being perfect all the time, especially, you know, with how things are at the minute, particularly I'm seeing in the UK, a lot of declining in rugby anyway, as far as, as far as regular weekly fixtures go, not necessarily as far as, yeah. This is something that I want to explore is the, is the barrier to entry that is, is, is the barrier to entry of rugby gain higher and therefore driving participation count, or is it just in general, people have got more options as to what to do with their lives on the side. But that's geez, we could go on. We could just be, this could just be the tangents podcast if we wanted it to be made, but I want to. I want to get your aunts and then, okay, so you've said once a year, it would be,

Alex 16:09

no, it wouldn't necessary be once a year, but a bit, at least

TJ 16:11

once a year, at least once he is if we have to give it percentages time, percentage of times to 20% of the time would be the specific phase.

Alex 16:22

Yeah, I think so.

TJ 16:24

It's almost impossible to, I'm just trying to get some like real numbers on it. Yeah. Just so that people can understand and wrap their head around it. You know, if you're looking at CrossFit region, that's, that's fucking impressive, right? They're doing there. They're the top of like, you look at their lift numbers, you look at their, all of their numbers across the board are great right there. Their Fran time, their whatever time is going to be like, you'd look at that and you blow this person. That's the fucking nuts they are spending the majority of that time, still working on developing their general qualities. Absolutely. And like, people don't think that when they think CrossFit, they think when they think of CrossFit, they think, okay, I'm going to go in, I'm going to do a, what I'm going to do. The friend like to get the best friend time, you wouldn't just keep doing Fran, you would get stronger. You would then actually work for Fran. You wouldn't. I mean, you, if it was just Fran, you, you wouldn't need any aerobic sickness, but you, that would come along. Just because it would be part of your training and you, this is a stupid straw man scenario, but you still get the point. Right. Even if it was just to be better at the wa that particular ward, you would still not just do that particular one, you would do other things. And so within CrossFit, we look at mat cons and we think, okay, that's, that's it. We're going to do CrossFit. And that's going to help us become a better rugby player, right?

Alex 17:48

Yeah. I mean, you can't just expect to be constant portion limited just by Haiti.

TJ 17:54

Yeah. And so speaking of which we're going to have to go back to that two year scenario and you gotta answer for a rugby player.

Alex 18:03

Yeah. I, for rugby, I would have a more concurrent style,

TJ 18:07

so you're not allowed to know, but right now you're not fucked.

Alex 18:20

So

TJ 18:22

it's so difficult though. Right? Cause you would still have those three phases, but you would do them concurrently. You would still you'd spent. And you'd spent most of that time as I fucking a yap on about right. Is developing the, that, that high seating. You get your speed work in, you get your strength work. You, you get as high as you can like with all the view outputs that you need for rugby, you become like a beast with your high intensity actions and then you, you really. Widen your base. So you get the best aerobic system. You get the best, even with talking about hypertrophy, you grow big muscles to support more intense actions, to support more strength, growth. That's a terrible way of phrasing it, but it's sport more strength gain because of your extra muscle, which will support more power, which you no doubt trickle down to everything else. You, you develop overall movement patterns better, and that really widens your base out. Now you've got really wide base. You've got really high seating. You've got so much room then to what in the middle. Now the thing is with rugby is you do that work in the middle on a Tuesday, on a Thursday night. If you're a you know, just a local player, you do that work on a Saturday. If you're playing, if you're in season, you do that work on. Or if you're just doing your touch rugby, or if you're doing whatever, like that's, when you do that work, you don't really need to do that work to do. That middle room you've, you're developing this wide base. You're developing this tool seat in that middle is going to come by default, right?

Alex 19:52

Yeah. I mean that, what you've just described as can come and

TJ 19:55

training. Yeah. I know. And it works for us and then, you know, it's almost like we're building out. Yeah. We've, we've got the wide base, real solid foundation. We've got a big high ceiling. We built the building first, before we go inside and we start doing all the decorations. But if you're a CrossFit athlete, those decorations have to start that you actually do have to spend time work on those because they are important. And I mean, if you're doing double unders that's a difficult skill. If you're doing butterfly, pull-ups like that's standard. Right. That's not even just if you don't do butterfly pillar, pull-ups really well, you're not doing anything across every region. Yeah. But you know, even close. All right. With rugby, it becomes more of a skill. I mean, the skills are. That, but they're almost seen as a completely different entity. You're you're seen as working on your past and you're seen as walking on your tackling, et cetera, we've CrossFit, because those skills are sort of gym based, weird, fundamental. But, but the, but the war, the war was getting muddied a little bit. Right. Cause it gets a little bit confusing.

Alex 21:00

Yeah. I mean, you could do the weightlifting where you have like skill sessions on rehab sessions, but it should be this.

TJ 21:07

And even then it's difficult because the scale of snatching with 40% is completely different to the skill needed to snatch with

Alex 21:16

a hundred. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's, it's not S we see in powder thing as well, but I mean, that's the skill of program right.

TJ 21:24

Wagon, but yeah, I definitely think that that's, if we can think of things across, if it can do better for crosses. It's the same approach that we would say to rugby players, right? It's it's developed those qualities first. Don't just, I mean, just do as minimal amount of Metcons as you need to. In fact, that's a general rule of thumb because I like, and I've, I've got the caveat is as you need to, it like puts that caveat in there of like, if you're one week out by now, one week out, super close, but if you're a six weeks out from the CrossFit games, you might need to do some fucking Metcons. That's fine. Like that's the place. If you're on a Thursday and you've got more planned as to what to do, but you're playing a game on Saturday. You don't, you don't need to. But is there anything else that you think is a sport CrossFit can do better? The,

Alex 22:18

People differentiate between why people do CrossFit. Like some people just go in and they just want to kill themselves. Maybe that's like this, that just like jump for those people. Like if they don't get that high intensity stimulus, they're like in the house to go to the gym. But yeah. So we, so we kind of go to kind of separate those people out. So I'm not like educate people better.

TJ 22:48

That's what I was going to say. Cause that, that those people that want to do that, like, yes, I understand it. But even then like killing that there are so many different ways that you can do that. And if you're talking about like zoning out and just, just taking care of business, right? Like there are so many different ways that you can do that, that aren't CrossFit that probably aren't cross crusted. The aren't Metcons a lot of time, like when we're talking, when we say the word CrossFit, CrossFit and Metcon sort of get into changeable, right. Metcons aren't necessarily the one, like if you, you can zone out and do 40 minutes of real quality zone to work, you know, and if you really want it to struggle like, you know, do it in, I dunno, do it inside and with your eyes closed. Yep. Cool. Cool. I don't know, man. I, I think, I think in general, like set some goals and try and achieve those goals and you don't have to do to think in as to what you need to do. You just have to do the execution, AKA get a coach, right? Like that's genuinely, like, I know this is what we do. So we're like, obviously we're going to say this, but we believe in it so much. It's so true that like, if you're, if you're a lot of those people that want to just go to the gym and zone out and kill themselves, it's because they don't know any better. And it's because they don't want to think about it. Yeah. If you think about it enough to think about why you want to do it, like what, like, I, I want to go kill myself. Why? Because I know the exercise is important. Why? And you eventually get to a point where you, you can have a goal that isn't, the answer is not do a Metcon five days a week.

Alex 24:32

I just said, well,

TJ 24:36

what do

Alex 24:36

you mean? Well, if I had to go into a gym and just like beast myself for an hour, like every single day, well, I just wouldn't want to be there. I'd be so bored.

TJ 24:49

Yeah. I think you get that. You get, that's why you get quite a high dropout rate with these things. But that's, well, what, where CrossFit sort of the, the dodgy thing with CrossFit is like, you get up, you do get a high dropout rate, but those that stay, go through such a process that that's what get, gets CrossFit. The, the coat reputation, right?

Alex 25:11

Yeah. I mean, there's definitely like a confirmation bias that right. I was involved with

TJ 25:15

supplies as well. Yeah. But yeah, both of those things is definitely true. Like, whereas if you, you're starting to see it more and more and more, not just because Greg Glassman showed himself out to be a bit of a piece of shit. It's also because you know, other gyms are following that model and they don't want to pay classmen or CrossFits lawyers thousands of dollars a year. They want to just do get all the benefits from it and they can do that group. And that's why group training is being, it's still growing in popularity, you know, year on, year on year, because it takes that. But you can program this in a much smaller way. The difficulty there is, as we've said, you could get one person in a gym for a certain reason. You could get nine other people in that exact same small group and they go for 10 different reasons. So therefore this PR solutions to those 10 different problems are 10 different solutions, but you can still mimic them if you do it well, you can still mimic, you can still get a group environment and do 10 different programs. And I think that's something that you built out incorrect in your CrossFit gym when you were there, right?

Alex 26:26

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, a lot of times that's socialized as well, so there's no time to actually talk, like you're not even taking that kind of flash points.

TJ 26:36

Yeah. Yeah. That's a, that's a big thing. I think it is weird. I was talking about this before. When we're at the gym, like you go, you show up and these are your friends, but you don't have the time to talk to them because you have, you're not giving yourself the rest. That's what makes like another huge benefit to like proper strength training, where you do get those rest of that rest between reps, you get. Yo you take care of business, you have fun. So you, you take care of business, you do your heavy set and get it done. You've worked your ass off for that, you know, five to 20 seconds you stop. And yet you, you just have fun with your mates,

Alex 27:13

take a 15

TJ 27:14

minute break. You don't have to take a 15 minute right away. But it's the same thing that I think should happen in most rugby centers as well. Right? You have a bit of a laugh. You go get a drink of water or you have a bit of a laugh when you line up to do the four corners of justice drill or whatever your drill you're doing. And then when it comes time to, to take an action, you do your action. You do intensity to get up

Alex 27:39

and then it comes through naturally.

TJ 27:42

Yeah, it definitely does. Okay. So what you said, I think your answer was just better education, but it's difficult to educate people. The actual, did you hear a double meeting? It's difficult to educate people when you're at the actual system that you're educating them in is, is fundamentally flawed. I would just be bad coach, but yeah. Yeah. But so you would, you would go against you you'd be like the pastor at the front of the church telling people that Jesus wasn't really the son of God.

Alex 28:23

I mean, yeah. It's not true that you can't preach it.

TJ 28:27

Yeah. But then you're not a pastor

Alex 28:31

you're freaking out the same pastor.

TJ 28:33

I already thought you were going to say, yeah, I'll be a pizza, but yes, a hundred percent. I know what you're saying. I get your point. Right. So in general, CrossFit should take the good things that he's doing, but slightly. Slightly biased, the training less, but then what happens is people enjoy those workouts. Right? They feel like they finished those workouts. They feel like they've accomplished something. Yeah. Like you say, they get that survivorship bias, a confirmation bias. They feel like they've done that. Is there a way that they can sprinkle those in then if we're looking at this current model?

Alex 29:04

Yeah. I mean, just because we're saying when property appropriately, it doesn't mean there's no high intensity work, but you said like in rugby training, I used to see as people that you still have to do a high intensity work, it's just maybe that isn't the primary focus or maybe the volumes are lower, but you don't need a ton of exposure to high intensity work to maintain quality. So yeah, like don't be Tempe. So confined spaces, widget idea that perhaps your work has to be low and slow while you're preparing for a task, which means you, at some point you got to cover with base.

TJ 29:37

Yeah. And in general, like if we're looking at those numbers of yours, was it 30% is

Alex 29:43

25

TJ 29:44

cents and then 10 to 20 is, is the bridge. The rest of that is that's how you could also look at any given microcycle or any given Meza cycle is like, that's how you'd want to probably divide up your time in January. If you're doing concurrent, like you could do one hot one or two high intensity sessions and along with four or so, when we say lower intensity doesn't necessarily mean that you're, you know, you're just on the elliptical fucking scratching your ass, reading a book, or it doesn't mean you're on a leg extension machine, just knocking out reps off the reps off the reps was texting someone. Like that's not what we mean. Like you can do real quality work. And build real quality improvement and that patient without the fatigue. And that's why we're doing it right, is that you can build that base out so much, so much wider to allow you then when it comes to doing that high intensity work, whether that's a ward, whether that's a real intense Metcon, whether that's a rugby game, like when that game was there or when that challenge is there, you're much more prepared for it. And if it's a train in stimulus, you're going to get more training stimulus out of it as a result of that. Any other problems that you see with people generally wanting to do CrossFit as a modality to become a better rugby plan? Now we'll look at things.

Alex 31:03

I mean, yeah. That's overused stuff going on there, like rugby to shoulder unfriendly, sometimes cost particularly shoulder. And for an example this terrible loneliness of it, it's quite hard. I don't know. I don't think there's a really good way of doing both at the same time. Because like CrossFit, like you can be pressing a ton. There's a ton of pressing clustered, and most people don't have the control of the show,

TJ 31:27

even, even like the butterfly pull-up has an element of pressing in there. Right. So, and maybe it's because you can't measure like the angle, but you never see rows apart from obviously the concept too, but you never see like barbell or dumbbell rows, particularly in the competitions. Right. So I'm just going off by like yeah. So, but you get so much precedent and so that's obviously going to, yeah, that is definitely going to build an imbalance issue. I think that lower body. Fairly equal amount, except potentially there's not enough single, single leg stuff.

Alex 32:00

I think I disagree with that. I think there's a lot of single leg stuff, but I think it's all very quad dominant. There is not a ton of engine.

TJ 32:07

Yeah. Cause even like the, especially if you do, you know, if you're doing a bounce off the floor that lifts, you can catch it and sort of quite an upper as well as opposed to yeah, definitely your ID and you don't, there's no audio because again, you're not is, there's no requirement. There's no way to measure if you're doing an idea versus a dead lift. So you can't, that gets scrapped.

Alex 32:28

Yeah. Even like there's not often dead lifts, but it's clean, but clean is just, it's pretty, quite dominant. Anyway, wherever you seem clean, you do everybody Olympia that GT comes to squat as well. So we see people with Joni are like great quote development of initially in development, which has its own issues, especially if you've been demanded and sprinting afterwards, if you're on the train Palm Springs and sprinting's as an issue. Definitely. So there is a, I think it's not a lot of like frontal plane movement say satchel and there's not a ton of rotation.

TJ 32:57

We've been Eva. And I was going to say, versus there's none of this. Yeah. Everything is, and that's, that's a lot of general, I think that would, if we're looking at rugby players, that's a general weight room mistake that I see a lot and it's, it's easily fixed. It's not, we're not saying for every, you know, sorry, when we're talking Plano movements, we're talking about like, for the most part, when you're in the gym, right. You're you're resisting gravity or moving things up. I mean opening them down, but you'll still resistant Grammy by putting something down to put away up in like that's, that's, I'd say 99.9% of weight room activity, right. Even when you're running, you're you're up and down, you're going up against gravity. When we w we can also move laterally, we can move side to side. You do so in a game of rugby, you also rotate more often than not. And he gave him a you'll do in all three. Now, obviously, as we've already alluded to when you're in the weight room, or when you're in the gym, or when you're doing physical work to get better at ropy, you'll try to build muscle while you're trying to build strength, kind of awkward to do that in the lab, doing the lateral wall, doing rotation wants to do that. However, like when we're looking at power and we're looking at stability, stuff like that, we want to make sure that we get in some. Do 90% of our work just up and down, lifting weights, just clanging and banging and getting some quality work done, but we don't want to make, we want to make sure that our gains completely transfer and we want to make sure that with less injury, we have less injury risk when we go onto the pitch. And we're just that much more prepared. So a little bit of rotational work, a little bit of a lateral work can go such a long way. And for you as a human, not just a rugby player, so the, when we're looking across for it and we're criticizing how CrossFit makes you the fittest athlete in the world, then we're looking at like maybe they shouldn't issues more of that. Right?

Alex 34:45

Yeah. And I think that they are trending towards some bottom lines away. He seemed a bit more autopsy at work.

TJ 34:51

Especially when they do the, they do the burpees over the bar is about as, as as it does that hits all three planes.

Alex 34:57

I mean, yes. Yeah. They have a good one with a few years ago where they had to, they started with top of a tennis stadium to carry sandbags down to the course, take a course, climb over the wall

TJ 35:08

transfers. Was that the one where the one girl had to quit? Because she was, she was dying. She'd like literally nearly died because it was so, cause it was also really hot.

Alex 35:16

Oh yeah. It must be sunny that here. I think they have that trail run as well. Actually. Yeah.

TJ 35:21

If we're looking at things that we want to say CrossFit should be doing better. This is something that I think attracts rugby players in the first place, which is not a good thing. And and probably, I dunno, it's celebrate again. It goes into that confirmation bias. It's this idea that, of like pushing yourself to the limit all the time and celebrate in the hashtag grind. This sort of culture that they breed of or pukey the clown is a perfect example. Right? You're you, you put yourself not

Alex 35:50

like that. I mean, that's, I think they've covered that now, but the whole idea was fucking

TJ 35:54

same and what I've got pukey on rapto yeah, yeah.

Alex 35:58

This

TJ 35:59

like this, you can like, firstly, like you shouldn't say like, you shouldn't celebrate that, right? Like that's not like you haven't really accomplished enough and you've just pushed yourself really hard, but that's not like what's the task. Like if you puked and someone else coasted in a minute before you, like, you know what I mean? That person that coasted in is much more prepared. They should be celebrated. That's the task. The task is always in like a game of rugby. The task isn't to work hard, the task is to win or the task is whatever it is, you know, it's Y.

Alex 36:34

Because he just completed the task and he's not working fucking hardest. He takes

TJ 36:37

away yeah. A hundred percent. And so like, I mean, if you look at all of the people that I love using Matt Fraser as an example, because he was so dominant, Froning too, to an extent I'm not sure about the pneumonic. I, I, I've just not clued up on it. But he's in the lead and they just looked so calm. Right. And it's not, you know, maybe they are pushing themselves, but they're just develop themselves on that much of a high level that everything looks easy. That's what you should be celebrated, not pushing yourself so hard that you, you look like a cat screech and every time you dead lift or, you know, you know, you, you're pushing them with the slide, with the most ugliest form in the world or whatever CrossFit meme you want to find. Right. That's not like you're not developing anything there and you're not achieving anything there. Like it's already. Sorry, that, so that would be something that I definitely think CrossFit needs or rugby players from a lens of CrossFit should be really wary of because it's also the same thing in rugby, right? Like, yeah. The amount of times that we would do back in the day, like, you know, you've got an old school shitty coach, you do coat hangers. So you'd start at the halfway line. You go through the one post, you go to the other and they would never, they would never tell you how many that you've got to do so you can pace yourself and you would do them for no reason, just because you lost the game. And that's the time when we're talking about utilizing your time efficiently and not finding stuff like that's like if you've got 90 minutes on a Tuesday, 90 minutes on a Thursday, like you want to be spending that time being as technical as you fucking can and developing all of that stuff. Whereas doing hangers, it's just a, it's just a waste

Alex 38:12

wasted. Finally punishments.

TJ 38:15

Yeah, a hundred percent. I mean, in general, this could be a whole other podcast, but I'm just not a fan anymore of you using rugby time as fitness time. Because if you're doing fitness, like it's going to come anyway, make it slightly more intense, gives you maybe a slight extra lactic fitness benefit, but it gives you none of the skill benefit or technical benefit or tactical benefit that you would have done having practiced rugby. And it gives you a shit ton more fatigue, which means that the next few days you're, it becomes that much harder to make extra improvements. And like, it just doesn't make sense and we need to be, we need to get away from it.

Alex 39:03

Yep. Totally agree. Most early under fatigue, really difficult.

TJ 39:05

Is that another thing that we is that lead on your cell phone to another thing that we can improve across.

Alex 39:12

Yeah, I guess I didn't even occur to me before, but I mean, discover that honestly, learning new skills when you're tired is almost impossible. Right? When we look it up motor learning hierarchy, we want to give like a low poverty, low load, low speed, all the way to like heartache high load high speed. But to get there, there's like seven or eight steps you go fulfill first. Yeah. Yeah, we do have skilled wellbeing folks.

TJ 39:34

That would be something actually that I would say in general across it does better than rugby though. So hear me out. So like in CrossFit, you, you know, if you go to your first, a lot of GM's will, you know, you can't just show up and go and do CrossFit and I go, okay, here's, here's your word? Like, no, you'll have to go to like a four week on-ramp to understand the methodologies and, and pray to the alter of whoever's in charge now. Cause it's not classmen. So yes. Anyways, you know, you do the different, you learn the fundamental movement. So if you don't know how to power clean, I think they teach you like a, whatever it is regression. Right? And you do those things and you, and you, you, I mean, they can do it so much better. Obviously the Hensel of the memes where you learn a degree of technicality before you do any words, you know, for, for most of this stuff now, you know, wherever you then should at any point, just transition into doing four once a week as a completely or four Metcons a week is a different conversation, but they do a good job of teaching you the basic skills before putting you in a high intensity rugby. And then even like, as part of the warmup, they do good, a good amount of skill work, I think. Yeah. And you know, then, then eventually at the end, you'll do your, you do your Metcon in rugby. I think too often those skills that you've learned once sort of taken for granted and we go far too often straight into. Small side of the game. So we go straight into small cyber games or four games or team runs and set piece work, and then that's it. And you don't get the time to really technically work on your left-handed pass or your I don't know, your chasing tackle or your carry and ability, you know, from a pass on the left. Like I think this is something that people need to understand is you should constantly be working at your skills as a rubber plan. It's difficult because there are so many fucking skills, but that means you need to put more time into them, a low level, you know, before training. Like, because you can't take the responsibility. If your coach can't just take the full responsibility to do all of your skills like lineup lifting, just, just practice, just lifting and getting that coordination down. Then when it comes to working on your set piece, you've got that skill down and it becomes a much easier Robbie. Doesn't do a very good job of differentiating when it's skill practice, when it's technical practice versus when it's like game time practice probably rough is probably even the biggest one. Right? You get to a rock and you just you're taught. Maybe you're taught if you're new or you're a kid you're taught a couple of times, then it just goes, okay, you're going to hit this fucking bag as hard as you can, or you're going to hit, you know, and what we're doing, we work in the technicality of how to rock in which case, this is way to higher intensity to do that. And while also we working on, if that's all we're working on, you know?

Alex 42:20

Yeah. Ma'am I I started agree. That's one of the biggest issues I have skills. Cause then the staff, as they see, what did they see? Like, no, no, no. If I can tell you what to do

TJ 42:30

a hundred percent. That's why your winger.

Alex 42:32

Yeah, no

TJ 42:33

problem. That's I mean, that's it though, like a hundred percent that makes, that makes so much sense. Is there anything, but is there anything else that you think cross the rugby players or is there anything else that CrossFit does well that rubber players can also learn from or rugby as a sport can learn from? Because it's obviously it's a new sport. There must be. I mean,

Alex 42:53

yeah. I like the intensity when it's required. I think they do quite well as well, but I noticed kind of a same it's on the other side of the coin. Like when, when it's time for intensity, they're pretty good at bringing up

TJ 43:05

yeah. And encouraging each other to do it as

Alex 43:07

well. Yeah. Yeah. I really like, I mean, as, as much as we're like bagging on the intensity, like element, like there's a time and a place for it. Yeah,

TJ 43:16

definitely. And I think often, like it's also both and both parties could be guilty of this, but I do think rugby is good. It is that like, you're almost expected to be intense for all of Tuesday, all the firsts. The whole game on, on, you know, the whole game on Saturday, like including run into the coach at halftime, including run into the scrum to get ready for that. Like, you know what I mean? You're expected to perform at such a high intensity. It's just not possible. And in fact, like all the best players, like the play, you know, you could see any, so you see it. So often the players that look like they're getting everywhere. It's not because they're the fittest player. Like Tom Curry sometimes looks like there's two of them and that's not just because he's got a twin brother, actually, it was just cause he's got a twin brother. I was going to make it know when he's playing for England. Right? Like he hit, he might, he saw effective at the breakdowns, but that's not because he goes to every breakdown and tries as hard as you can eventually get. He comes out good because he chooses when to get involved at the right time. Yeah. I think if you can learn that skill probably by just being fit or in general, right. By, by being aerobically more sound, you can analyze everything much better, you know, when that intensity needs to come. And it's the same thing, I guess, with CrossFit, right? If you're, if you know, what's expected of you for a given session or for a given Metcon, you know, when you really need to push and maybe when, you know, you need to go on broken for X amount of sets versus when you can take it steady.

Alex 44:58

Yeah. I, pacing's a huge, like, people don't know about pacing and I same thing. Right. It was, you know, hanging every rock. It's just pacing your own patients.

TJ 45:10

Okay. So in general, like I think, do you, do you like CrossFit?

Alex 45:17

I like sports. I think it's quite interesting. As far as like Bobo sports go, like it's probably up there more interest. I don't look at the training modality. I like it as, as I like that.

TJ 45:29

Well, but it's, but, but when you're saying as a training modality, you're saying that as, as Matt, Kahn's being the training modality,

Alex 45:38

Yeah. Traditional CrossFit, I guess, is what I'm talking about way you just couldn't beat yourself and kind of, don't worry about anything else, basically old bad things that we said today as training.

TJ 45:48

Yeah. Cause that's the thing, right? It's it's like, what I do really appreciate about it is the idea that you're trying to be prepared in all things you're trying to be really be a complete athlete across the broad, across the board. It was the same thing that makes me think Rabi's the fucking coolest sport, because you've got to do so many, not just different things, but opposing things like that, that not, you know, you're not just having to be someone that can. Prop and scrimmage against someone. And then you also have to run, like those are two complete opposite ends of the spectrum. So not, not only does one, like not only those goals, not aligned, they almost attract away from each other yet. You've still got to do that on a, on a regular basis for rugby and same thing for CrossFit and just the issue is right. How do you go about solving that? It's not by doing everything at once. And that's the problem that rugby players run into is a problem that CrossFit athletes run into. If they're not well-educated, it's not, you know, you, and because of the demands are so vast, like you need to have a plan and the longer that plan or the longer term, you set that plan, the more room you have to really develop, like the qualities that you need and the highest eventually your seating is going to be. Right. But I do think it's cool. I, you know, and then as a sport, what they've tried to do really well is like really define what fitness is. The problem is, is that it's definitely not, you know, not necessarily what fitness is, but they've really tried to, you know, get objective measures out there. The problem is, is that, you know, I don't know where all of these Olympic lifts came from, because I think if NFL, they're just a big barrier to entry to stop a know someone that's random, you know, some random villager that lives in Papua New Guinea, that just happens to be really fit, really jacked, really strong and everything. Like they have to go to CrossFit for two years to learn all of these skills, you know? So

Alex 48:02

my walks is trying to do right hard water is trying to make a low barrier entry kind of deal.

TJ 48:07

Yeah, yeah, yeah. A lot less. But even then there's like, you know, if you're a small it's, the rally is right there trying to accomplish the impossible because you, you just, you cannot have a uniform objective of what fitness is because the body is capable of doing so much, which then shows why rugby is such a great sport, right? Because there is not just one way to win the game. Like if you want to beat your opponent, you can fucking run straight over them or you can run around them or you can tactically prepare your team better. And there's all of these different ways within a team. You can have all these different players and there's different tactics. So like eventually you've just got to figure out what getting fitter means to you. And it's going to mean something on as a rugby player, probably as a human it's probably going to mean developing both ends of those spectrums, getting a bigger, getting them high again. Spending as little time in the middle as you need to, but when it's needed to know that you need to go there and know what's required of you, boom mate. Anything else that you want to talk to about CrossFit?

Alex 49:21

No, I

TJ 49:22

think that's pretty good. I think, you know, I, I want you to tell everyone that you hate CrossFit or you hate you draw two years that you spent there. Right? Cause you, you, you, you hope to go in there and just turn it into a power lifting gym and you're unsuccessful.

Alex 49:38

I made powerlifting the most problem, the option.

TJ 49:43

Ah, cool. You've changed your handle recently. So I want to make sure that if people want to follow you and follow your ramblings about data, when it comes to training, they know they know where to follow you.

Alex 49:55

So I did a, I did a presentation for USA powder thing last week. It was about data and analysis and checking metrics. I literally made a graph about how often I'll make graphs for Instagram.

TJ 50:06

Yeah. Infographics on info and mate, they are on ironically, very popular people. Love to make infographics on the infographics, particularly when we're talking about like how infographics are really important for social media and that stuff.

Alex 50:21

Yep. The handy easy. But anyway, yeah. So coach unschool, Alex unschool, Kabuki.

TJ 50:28

I'll put it in the links below me. Sweet, good, man. That was a really good episode. I enjoy chatting.

Alex 50:33

See.

50:40

All right. Hey, there's TJ, once again. Thank you for listening to that episode. I hope you enjoyed it. I'm just here. One more time. I know you thought you were rid of me, I've got some pretty cool that I want to send your way. I've tried to condense all the most important things that you need to make progress. The training, the mindset, the nutrition, everything you hear in these podcasts and more presented in a. Two week program called Robbie muscle kickoff through kickoff. You'll have access to two weeks of emails delivered directly to your inbox. So it's a videos, education, and interaction and access to tools, strategies, tactics previously reserved only. Paying clients to join. Simply click the link in the description of this podcast, the one that says kickoff, or if you want to go old school and type it out, then crack on access it@roby-muscle.com forward slash kickoff. All one word she is for listening to podcasts. So you guys next time.